104 Quotes by Oswald Spengler

Instead he adopts the position taken by Nietzsche in regard to the spectacle of history: it lacks intrinsic meaning, and the gods are indifferent to the fate of man, forcing him to seek to overcome them and in the end replace them with the image of himself. According.

A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think.

Man is an element of all-living nature that rises in rebellion against nature. He will pay for this defiance with his life. Through this act of defiance, man distinguishes himself from all other living things, which as pure nature are blended into the tapestry of the natural universe. Mankind is the hero of this tragedy, world history the final act of the tragedy itself.

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come.

Will and loneliness are at bottom the same.

Higher man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with blood, deformed and mutilated it. But there was greatness in it. When he is no more, his destiny will have been something great.

A beast of prey tamed and in captivity – every zoological garden can furnish examples – is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead. Some of them voluntarily hunger-strike when they are captured. Herbivores give up nothing in being domesticated.

We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.

A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless –– such is the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history.